Bob 2010: Best of babble

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Catchfire Catchfire's picture
Bob 2010: Best of babble

OMG Bob's here! It's:


Best of babble 2010




Remember that awesome thing that person said that time? Post it here!

Some of my fondest memories of 2010:

When will white people stop making movies like Avatar? and Avatar: An Extension of White Supremacy

CMOT Dibbler wrote:
The prospect of curing disability dangles a medical carrot in front of the disabled, a carrot that the vast majority of us will never be able to eat, while showing us that our bodies are inadequate, broken and ugly.    Rember how gorgeous the Na'vi bodies were?  How gray and indusrial his gimpy life was?  He was in prison.  Inside his Na'vi body, he was free.  This is a bad message to send.

500_Apples wrote:
Ultimately, we'll have to change as a society, which Avatar legitimately imagines we won't. If we don't change, we'll spread our imperialism across the galaxy within a few million years, unless a more technologically advanced species stops us.

Le T wrote:
I think that it is questionable to dissmiss criticism of pop culture as if it is some holier than thou crowd. It's ok to question what is popular. It is healthy to do so. When millions of people go see a film like Avatar and declare it to be anti-oppressive, anti-colonial, anti-American or anti-war it is important to expose the fact that the movie is a simple re-do of a colonial narrative.

And so on...

Kahnawake FN evicting non-Natives (and II and III)

Joey Ramone wrote:
This isn't too complicated and there's no need to be so delicate. The Indian Act band council, which is not a FN government but rather an administrative branch of the federal Department of Indian Affairs, is enforcing the racist Indian Act against overhwleminingly poor "non-status" Mohawks, and a few people who have too little Mohawk blood (many of whom are the parents of Mohawk children) because it lets them appear to be fighting colonialism while they are actually doing no such thing, ever.

Charter Rights wrote:
They are a Nation of people whom have never given up or capitulated their soveriegnty. Just as our govenrment has the right to define who are Canadian, and then expell those who are in our country illegally, Kahnawake people have the right to decide their own citizenry and likewise demand illegal aliens leave. We may not like it but we have to accept it. It is their business and has nothing to do with us.

Yiwah wrote:
So then the question becomes, what makes you FN?  Or Inuit?  Or Metis?

Is it only blood, is it only cultural, or is it somewhere inbetween?

There are Metis in Alberta who are more full-blooded than most Mohawk, but they do not consider themselves FN, they are fiercely Metis.  The Mohawk are a proud people, who work hard to maintain their traditions and revitalise their language...does having mixed blood make them weaker or less culturally strong?  Is outside blood the threat, or is it the loss of culture, and do the two always go hand in  hand?

and on and on...

Best thread title ever (by West Coast Greeny)? Maybe. Plus a kickass letter by Corky Evans to start it off. But perhaps the jury is still out on the content of the thread itself.

James Trek II: The Wrath of Kwan


So what's your favourite? Post it here.

N.B. The hope here is for the good kind of nostalgia, not the bad kind. Don't start fights!


Bob 2010


Catchfire Catchfire's picture

And let's not forget the best Toronto G8/G20 coverage anywhere on the net.

It's coming!

It's coming soon!

It's here!


bagkitty bagkitty's picture

Despite appearances to the contrary, I don't particularly enjoy coming across as a wet blanket... but this reminds me so very much of the Silly Season Part II - that December until mid-January period in which the MainStreamMedia takes yet another vacation from having to look at the real world and fills its pages and broadcasts and whatever with top ten lists, and what's hot and what's not lists and the like.

Maybe I am just being crabby again. Oh well, at least it is in the "banter" forum, and not trying to portary itself as news.




bagkitty bagkitty's picture

hence the bag Wink

Catchfire Catchfire's picture

bagkitty, sometimes I wished we lived in the same city so that I could just hug you and hug you untill all the humbug was squeezed out of your system. Feel free to ignore this thread and return to all the really really important threads on babble from which Bob is taking away valuable market share.  Might I recommend something on Carole James, 9/11, gardening or Cuba.



P.S. I expect this thread will eventually look something like this:


bagkitty bagkitty's picture

Which, I may add, you can have when you pull it from my cold, dead paws.Tongue out

Catchfire Catchfire's picture

So, I would appreciate any other babblers' thoughts on what the best threads of the year were. I could post more, but they'd probably be full of my posts, which, while obviously awesome, wouldn't be in the holiday spirit. Bump?


This was my favourite thread of the year, I think. Even though I opened it - and dictated that all discussion must be conducted from an "unambiguously pro-dishwashing perspective", the finest posts were by others. I loved that it went to 60 posts, just sort of petered out, and I can't recall a single snide nasty comment. We need more like it, I think:

[url= Sinks and Dishwashers Forum[/url]

Catchfire Catchfire's picture

That's more like it. What a beaut! It's got it all: castigation of crumbling infrastructure, plate-spinning, ideology, German pop groups, aprons and dogs. Thanks Unionist!

Maysie Maysie's picture

Hey thanks for the memories, Unionist. I realized I hadn't gone back into that thread after my vacay, and missed ElizaQ's pic of the most perfect cute puppy ever.

[insert squeaking noises]

And ElizaQ posting cute photos, of course, took me back to this one. And I said some very embarrassing things in that thread and linked to it anyways.

I think ElizaQ gets the "Cutest Real-Life Photos of Real Creatures in Her Life" award.

Catchfire Catchfire's picture

You know, this was a really nice and thoughtful thread: How did babble change since early times?

alien wrote:
We used to have long discussions about basic-principle ideas (one of the things that attracted me to Babble in the first place) and we had the patience to discuss them fully.

Most of the threads today seem to be primarily about current events and concerns. There also seems to have been more fun and humour back then but I may be wrong about that -- I have not read all the current threads to form an opinion.

Maybe some of us were a lot younger back then?

oldgoat wrote:
One huge difference I think involves numbers.  We were a much more intimate group back at the beginning, and as a small community could handle dissidence differently.  Also, what may now be firm written policy we were just figuring out back then.  I often refer to the first summer before 911 as a golden time of innocence on this board.  I fondly remember the parties we had for people's 1000 post mark.  I remember the very first banning, and the surrounding angst about having to jettison one of our members.  He was a lefty, too, just didn't play well with others.

skdadl wrote:
The summer of '01 was indeed a golden time of innocence -- I will never forget it, and I am grateful to everyone who was here then. Then. and really for a long time afterwards, because we were feeling our way along and building together, we were relatively cohesive. There was a lot of shared understanding and shared history and mutual trust, even when we had arguments. Maybe there's a limit to how long a single community can go on like that as it continues to grow; anyway, we reached ours.

We used to worry a lot that we were too cliquish, and newbies sometimes accused us of that, maybe fairly sometimes. I never thought that was an entirely bad thing, and now for sure I don't think it was a bad thing. We needed to change in some very particular ways, via the anti-oppression forums most obviously, which have been very valuable to a lot of people including lurkers, I suspect. But there was a clearer allegiance to basic principle, too, less need to go back and re-argue first principles, because we'd all grown into those together.

Catchfire wrote:
I've thought for a long while that the discussion-board format is actually a dying breed on the internet, and as a cultural materialist, that's what interests me most. Blogs, twittering, social networking--this seems to me to be the way political discussions like the one we have (have had?) on babble are going. Certainly, when the best rabble can do is pick me for a mod, there is a death knell sounding somewhere. Too many pale shadows to live up to, I think. Kind of like Brian Clough and Leeds United. Inheriting a champion team is about the worst thing that can happen to your career.

laine lowe wrote:
Interesting observation. I can't speak for the babble experience but I definitely noticed a peak in the political discussion-board forum that I used to moderate at, its height being between 2001 and 2003. That board was similar to this one but connected to Alternet. At some point, Alternet decided to introduce direct commentary to the articles they posted, similar to what most bloggers and media outlets use today, and decided to disband the Alternet discussion forums. This happened around 2005 and arrangements were made to absorb the online community under Cafe Utne boards. Soon after Cafe Utne, as a formal board attached to Utne Magazine, was let go and all their groups and sub-groups were carried over to a new server. By that time, membership for both Cafe Utne and Alternet's original forums had dropped significantly.

Tommy_Paine wrote:
Jesus Christ, I long for the days when I could be offended by someone here.

I always give everyone credit for being able to read the stuff I can read.  My referee is my ability to write, to communicate and if there's a bad call by the referee, I only have to look to my own fingers.   And, if someone is being an asshole towards me, I trust that most everyone else can see it too.

bagkitty wrote:
I am a little confused here... was that a "Golden Age" of [babble], or a "Gilded Age"?

Papal Bull

Question: is alien the gentleposter that used to masquerade as a Klingon? It makes sense, I believe, and they both have similar styles.

RevolutionPlease RevolutionPlease's picture

And who can forget the beloved and wildly popular "Science Fail: NIST physics..." series? Certainly one of my favourites, shocking though the contributor content might be.

Catchfire Catchfire's picture